At 01:28 2002/07/23 +0100, you wrote: >A concept for the future question this one. > >Is it possible to make a number of drives on a server (or number of servers) >appear as one large drive over the network. > >If so could some just give a broad outline of how this is achieved?
That's a sufficiently vague question that the answer almost has to be yes, but there an infinite number of ways to do it (depending on exactly what you mean). If you want multiple hard disk drives to appear as a single block device (which you can then create a filesystem on and access over a network if you so desire) without using RAID then you could try the Logical Volume Manager which you can read about at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO.html If you want to use block devices (e.g. hard disks) from other machines as physical extents for LVM array you can do so with the Network Block Device driver (documented as part of the Linux kernel documentation), but this is probably not a good idea for a production machine (a network outage of any kind would tend to result in massive data corruption). If you're interested in making multiple directories appear as one "drive" from the point of view of a remote machine then you don't need to mess around with RAID or LVM at all, the easiest thing to do is simply to create an empty directory to export (with NFS or Samba or ftpd or whatever) and populate it mountpoints and/or links to the stuff you want. Lets say, for example, that you wanted to have a directory that Windows users could map as a drive letter which would let them read the public FTP directory and the temp directory on the same machine that you're running Samba on, and also the public FTP directory on another machine down the hall. You can create the directory with something like: mkdir -p /var/samba/sharedfiles then do a "cd /var/samba/sharedfiles" and start adding content. First of all you want your temp dir (/tmp) and your public FTP dir (/var/ftp/pub) to appear. The easiest way to do this is to put in symbolic links to the directories themselves like this: ln -s /var/ftp/pub public_ftp ln -s /tmp temp (see also http://www.tldp.org/LDP/gs/node5.html#SECTION005110000000000000000 and the man page for the "link" command) For the machine down the hall you need something a little more complex. One approach would be to export it's /var/ftp/pub directory with NFS, and then mount the NFS export on your main machine dir using something like: mkdir /var/samba/sharedfiles/otherbox_ftp mount remotemachine:/var/ftp/pub /var/samba/sharedfiles/otherbox_ftp _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
